gardens of Looe, built up the acclivity on stone terraces one
above another; thus displaying the veritable garden architecture of the
mountains of Palestine magically transplanted to the side of an English
hill. Here, in this soft and genial atmosphere, the hydrangea is a
common flower-bed ornament, the fuchsia grows lofty and luxuriant in the
poorest cottage garden, the myrtle flourishes close to the sea-shore,
and the tender tamarisk is the wild plant of every farmer's hedge.
Looking lower down the hills yet, you see the houses of the town
straggling out towards the sea along each bank of the river, in mazes of
little narrow streets; curious old quays project over the water at
different points; coast-trade vessels are being loaded and unloaded,
built in one place and repaired in another, all within view; while the
prospect of hills, harbour, and houses thus quaintly combined together,
is beautifully closed by the English Channel, just visible as a small
strip of blue water, pent in between the ridges of two promontories
which stretch out on either side to the beach.

Such is Looe as beheld from a distance; and it loses none of its
attractions when you look at it more closely. There is no such thing as
a straight street in the place. No martinet of an architect has been
here, to drill the old stone houses into regimental regularity.
Sometimes you go down steps into the ground floor, sometimes you mount
an outside staircase to get to the bed-rooms. Never were such places
devised for hide and seek since that exciting nursery pastime was first
invented. No house has fewer than two doors leading into two different
lanes; some have three, opening at once into a court, a street, and a
wharf, all situated at different points of the compass. The shops, too,
have their diverting irregularities, as well as the town. Here you might
call a man a Jack of all trades, as the best and truest compliment you
could pay him--for here one shop combines in itself a drug-mongering,
cheese-mongering, stationery, grocery, and oil and Italian line of
business; to say nothing of such cosmopolitan miscellanies as wrinkled
apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils and fly-blown mock jewellery.
The moral good which you derive, in the first pane of a window, from the
contemplation of memoirs of murdered missionaries and serious tracts
against intemperance and tight-lacing, you lose in the second, before
such worldly temptations as gingerbread, shirt